The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

Summary

Lord Byron described Greece as great, fallen, and immortal, a characterization more apt than he knew. Through most of its long history, Greece was poor. But in the classical era, Greece was densely populated and highly urbanized. Many surprisingly healthy Greeks lived in remarkably big houses and worked for high wages at specialized occupations. Middle-class spending drove sustained economic growth and classical wealth produced a stunning cultural efflorescence lasting hundreds of years.

Why did Greece reach such heights in the classical period—and why only then? And how, after "the Greek miracle" had endured for centuries, did the Macedonians defeat the Greeks, seemingly bringing an end to their glory? Drawing on a massive body of newly available data and employing novel approaches to evidence, Josiah Ober offers a major new history of classical Greece and an unprecedented account of its rise and fall.

Ober argues that Greece's rise was no miracle but rather the result of political breakthroughs and economic development. The extraordinary emergence of citizen-centered city-states transformed Greece into a society that defeated the mighty Persian Empire. Yet Philip and Alexander of Macedon were able to beat the Greeks in the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BCE, a victory made possible by the Macedonians' appropriation of Greek innovations. After Alexander's death, battle-hardened warlords fought ruthlessly over the remnants of his empire. But Greek cities remained populous and wealthy, their economy and culture surviving to be passed on to the Romans—and to us.

A compelling narrative filled with uncanny modern parallels, this is a book for anyone interested in how great civilizations are born and die.

This book is based on evidence available on a new interactive website. To learn more, please visit: http://polis.stanford.edu/.

COVER IMAGE: Engraving of northeast view of the Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae near Phigalia, by Thomas Leverton Donaldson, from The Antiquities of Athens (London, 1830). Image courtesy of Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation.

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CONTENTS

IMAGES AND TABLES

PREFACE

I live in exceptional times. I can take for granted a global order defined by many independent states, some of them wealthy democratic federations governed ultimately by their citizens. Freedom, equality, and dignity are widely shared values. In states where citizens keep rulers in check, public authority protects individual rights and the rule of law pertains most of the time. These political conditions promote economic growth. The conjunction of democratic politics and a strong economy is, in practice, available only to affluent citizens of highly developed countries. But many people who do not yet enjoy those conditions aspire to them. Democracy and growth define the normal, although not yet the usual, conditions of modernity: Autocracy, while still prevalent, is regarded as aberrant, so that most autocrats pretend to be democrats. Economic stagnation is seen as a problem that demands a solution.

These conditions were not normal, or even imaginable, for most people through most of human history. But, for several centuries in the first millennium BCE, democracy and growth were normal for citizens in ancient Greece.

How that happened, and why it matters, is what this book is about.

New scholarship—much of it written by my colleagues at Stanford—has helped to show why the political and economic conditions of modernity are, historically, so exceptionally rare. For the past several thousand years of human history, and until the eighteenth century, most people lived under the rule of autocrats who claimed a special relationship to divinity. The most successful of these rulers were masters of extensive empires, but most of their subjects lived perilously close to bare subsistence. Rulers stayed in power by extracting surplus from their subjects and distributing the loot to a ruling coalition. Under these conditions, access to institutions is limited, rights remain vestigial, and economic growth is usually low.¹

This premodern normal can be summed up as domination—so long as we remember that some subjects had input into government, through consultative assemblies or petition rights, that autocracy was sometimes limited by tradition or religious institutions, and that subjects often accept the legitimacy of royal authority. Domination pertained across most of the world until the eighteenth century. Then things began to change, first in a few Atlantic countries and later across much of the world. The result is our modern political normal, a condition that may be summed up as democracy—so long as we keep in mind that many people in democratic societies are in fact dominated in various ways.²

The modern world is exceptional for its economic development and for its political development: not only for being (overall) wealthy, but also for the prevalence of democratic politics and the values that democracy sustains. I assume that few readers of this book would choose to live in premodern normal conditions of domination, even if their economic circumstances could be guaranteed. I assume that equally few would choose to live at the median economic level of a normal premodern society, even were it democratic. The citizens of modern developed countries need not make the choice between wealth and democracy. As we now know, democratic states are quite capable of achieving high levels of economic growth.

My colleague, Ian Morris, has shown that relatively high levels of development have historically been achieved under various political systems.³ The question of what institutional conditions are necessary or sufficient to sustain growth remains hotly debated. But what is not in question is that many people—including those not lucky enough to be affluent citizens of developed countries—have a strong preference, not only for affluence over poverty but also for democracy over domination. This is a normative preference, predicated on deeply held assumptions about the value of democracy relative to that of domination. I believe that there are good reasons for that normative preference. I assume that many readers of this book share my preference for democracy, even though your reasons may be different from my own.⁴

If we prefer our modern political and economic conditions to the premodern normal, we have good reason to inquire how we got here and to ask how likely it is that democracy plus wealth will become usual as well as normal. How is it that historically exceptional economic and political conditions came to be regarded as normal? Ought we to expect these conditions to persist where they currently pertain and to spread to the rest of the world? The prehistory of political and economic exceptionalism offers one relatively unexplored avenue by which we may address those questions.

The exceptional political conditions that I have summed up under the rubric of democracy—a social ecology of many independent states, federalism, citizen self-governance with its associated values—were indeed rare before the eighteenth century. But they were not unknown. Societies with these features include the Dutch republics of the sixteenth century, the Italian city-states of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—and classical Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. In each case, the era of economic exceptionalism was limited, and in no case did premodern political rights or economic growth reach levels comparable to those enjoyed by many citizens of the most highly developed states in the past 150 years. But these early societies each experienced an extended period of economic growth and cultural achievement in the context of a historically remarkable extension of citizenship.

A comparative analysis of these (and other) historical cases of political and economic exceptionalism would go a long way toward answering important questions about the origins and sustainability of our modern condition. Before that ambitious comparative project can be undertaken, however, we need to know more about each of the relevant cases. We need to explain how each historically exceptional society arose when and where it did and how and why its political and economic exceptionality was terminated. By offering a new political and economic history of ancient Greece, this book contributes to that project.

This is not a book about a putative great divergence between East and West, nor does it claim that democracy is either necessary or sufficient to sustain economic growth. It traces the rise of a society in which the normatively valued political conditions of democracy for an extensive body of citizens (although decidedly not for all residents) were conjoined with economic growth whose benefits were widely shared and with cultural achievements that had a lasting impact on the world. It measures growth, traces the causal relationship between Greek political and economic development, narrates the conquest of citizen-centered states by an autocratic empire, and explains why so much is still known about ancient Greek society.

It would be absurd to claim that ancient Greeks, who owned slaves, denied rights to women, and glorified war, offer an off-the-shelf model for us. The Greek transition from domination to democracy was incomplete, and it left a great many people behind. It would be equally absurd to claim that our modernity has all, or even most, of its roots in what happened in Greece some 2,500 years ago. But if we are interested in the conjunction of political and economic exceptionalism, we must start somewhere, and classical Greece was the society in which the wealth-and-democracy package first emerged in a form that can be studied in depth.

Classical Greece was not a state or a nation; it was an extensive social ecology of many independent city-states with citizen-centered governments. While the Greeks never fully formulated the concept of human rights, they did develop the basic democratic values of liberty, political equality, and civic dignity. The Greeks experimented successfully with federalism. Some Greek states practiced the rule of law, and some went a long way toward opening access to institutions. Political reforms were self-consciously enacted by Greek legislators, who sometimes left records of what they intended. Political development was critically analyzed in incisive and groundbreaking works of Greek political theory.

Because of the rich literary and documentary record surviving from classical antiquity, subsequent theorists and practitioners, eager to break with the norm of domination, were able to draw on Greek experience. For their own part, while they learned a great deal from other societies, the Greeks themselves had few precedents to build upon when devising democratic institutions and values. If we can explain the rise of classical Greece, we may gain a better sense of what it took to bootstrap the wealth and democracy package in the first place. If we can explain the fall of the Greek political order—that is, why major city-states did not maintain full independence for longer than they did—we may better understand democratic fragility.

My approach to explaining the rise and fall of classical Greece is that of a historian and political scientist. These are not the only ways to elucidate the Greek past. Scholars from the fields of anthropology, sociology, and literary studies have advanced our understanding of Greek culture in ways that are compatible with the results offered here. But there are ways to think about the ancient Greek world, associated with these three disciplines, that in their strongest forms, would render my project incoherent: First is an assumption that the Greek world was not actually exceptional. Next is a claim that Greece’s exceptionalism makes it analytically irrelevant. Third is an assertion that the exceptionalism of the Greek world has nothing to do with modern politics or economics.

The first assumption, that Greece is not exceptional because the Greek world shared various features with other premodern societies, seems to me insufficiently attentive to historically salient distinctions: It is certainly true that the Greek economy remained primarily based on arable agriculture; that Greeks practiced various sorts of morally repugnant status-based hierarchy, including slavery and other forms of coerced labor; and that polytheistic religion was an important part of the ordinary Greek’s worldview and daily practice. But the Greek economy was also, as we will see, fundamentally based on specialization and exchange; real wages (including the wages of at least some slaves) were much higher than the premodern norm. Religion was very important in Greece, as it was (and is) elsewhere. Yet classical Greece stands out among documented premodern societies, as the Oxford Greek historian Oswyn Murray has emphasized, in the prominence of formal rationality and explicitly political reasoning in the decisions and decision-making processes that set the course of its history.⁵

The second claim, that Greek exceptionalism renders the Greek case analytically meaningless, seems to me to place too much interpretive weight on historical prevalence. When studying some feature of a given society, a social scientist may (under some circumstances) discard outliers on the ground that the relevant sample is in the middle of the distribution. But in this case, the features that made the historical outlier exceptional are of great interest because the outlier appears quite similar, in salient ways, to our normal and because of its normative significance to us. Perhaps the city-state ecology was, as the Cambridge historical sociologist W. G. Runciman claimed, doomed to extinction because the Greek city-states were without exception, far too democratic.⁶ But the city-state ecology lasted for a very long time before it went extinct. All ancient empires, most of which proved more ephemeral than the city-state ecology, are likewise extinct. Insofar as we value democracy, and insofar as Greek democratic exceptionalism did anticipate exceptional conditions of modernity, we have strong reasons to want to know whether Greece’s doom must also be our own—and if not, why not.

The third assertion is based on the premise that, because each society is in some ways distinctive, societies are strictly incomparable. The strong version of the historicist argument rejects quantification and focuses on the contextual specificity of the societies in question and their cultural products.⁷ Historicists embrace the idea that comparative analysis highlights differences by showing how desperately foreign each society is when viewed from the perspective of the other. Comparison of similarities, on this argument, yields only false analogies. The historicist approach is, however, incomplete insofar as patterns of human behavior are fundamentally similar across societies widely separated in time and space. Social science (like natural science) is predicated on the possibility of determining regularities that underpin apparently diverse phenomena. The goal of much contemporary social science is to infer the causes of observed social, political, and economic phenomena, based on parsimonious micro-foundations—minimal and at least potentially testable assumptions about the motivations of individual and collective human action under specifiable conditions.

This book is both history and social science. As history, it may be characterized as middle-range in the sense of being neither global nor local, neither big nor micro-level. I do not attempt to match the breadth of global history or the level of generalization of recent big histories, which look at change and continuity over tens of thousands or millions of years.⁸ I am concerned to explain change and continuity in a society of several million people, in about a thousand states, over a period of several hundred years. I will sometimes focus on the doings of individual legislators or leaders, but more often I try to explain collective action at both the level of the state and at inter- and multistate levels. My approach is, therefore, at a much higher level of generalization than local or microhistory.⁹

As social science, my approach is also middle-range, straddling quantitative and qualitative methods. A good deal of the argument draws on quantified data. My discussion of Greek economic growth over time is necessarily quantitative, and I believe that it is possible to make substantial advances by using original data sets (compiled in conjunction with colleagues and students) based on recent monumental collections of evidence for the ancient Greek city-state ecology. I also make some use of simple game theoretic models, drawing on well-established social-scientific theories of political behavior and development. Although only one formal game is presented in full (appendix II), throughout the book readers are invited to think of Greek social relations in the form of games whose background rules induce individual players to make relatively cooperative choices. The aggregate of those prosocial choices was the thumb on the scale that tipped classical Greece toward sustained economic growth.

When addressing complex questions of long-term social development in a society that flourished in the distant past, it is impossible to employ a perfectly clean identification strategy—that is, to strictly distinguish independent (explanatory) variables from dependent variables and to rigorously test hypotheses through natural, lab, or survey experiments. The data I use are inevitably noisy, although, as I argue, not so noisy as to preclude valid conclusions. More generally, the social systems I address are sufficiently complex and the time spans long enough to introduce what social scientists call the problem of endogeneity—that is, feedback between causes and effects. Many of my results are based in part on qualitative analysis of literary and documentary sources. The conclusions of this book assume that quantitative and qualitative methods can be conjoined in ways that are rigorous enough to pass muster as causal explanation.¹⁰

My goal is to use the tools of the historian and the social scientist to explain two phenomena that seem to me especially relevant to the larger project of understanding political and economic exceptionalism: First is the sustained economic and cultural growth of the Greek world from 1000 to 300 BCE: the rise of classical Greece. The second phenomenon is the fall of classical Greece: the defeat of a coalition of Greek city-states by imperial Macedon in the late fourth century BCE, an event that ended the era in which fully independent city-states determined the course of Mediterranean history. I explain the economic rise by tracing the development of civic institutions and political culture in an environment of interstate and interpersonal competition and rational cooperation. I demonstrate how and why political development drove exceptionally high individual and collective investments in human capital, high levels of economic specialization and exchange, continuous technical and institutional innovation, high mobility of people and ideas, low transaction costs, and ready transfer of both goods and ideas. I distinguish the role played by these same political and economic developments in the political fall.

The rise and fall of classical Greece can be explained without special pleading involving a mystical Hellenic spirit and without spurious assumptions about inherent differences between the peoples of the East and West.¹¹ The answers to the questions of why and how Greece rose, fell, and persisted in the cultural memory of the world are of intrinsic interest. They bear on central issues in social science, including the problem of collective action without central authority and the role of political institutions in economic development. Those answers also bear on some of the biggest challenges and most promising opportunities that democratic citizens are now confronting in our own decentralized world.

In the chapters that follow, after posing the question of why Greece rose and fell, I present new data for answering that question. This new evidence shows just how far Greece had come from the age of Homer to the age of Aristotle, both politically and economically. I formulate new hypotheses concerning specialization and innovation to explain both rise and fall through a causal relationship between political and economic developments. I then offer a new narrative of Greek history, from the Early Iron Age to the Hellenistic period. The narrative expands and tests the explanatory hypotheses. Tracing the histories of great and small Greek city-states alike, the unfolding story reveals how the ecology of city-states grew so dramatically, over such a long period of time, how it was finally conquered, and how Greek culture became a world culture.

Chapter 1 introduces the puzzle of classical Greek exceptionalism. Chapters 2–4 explore the contours of a decentralized ecology of hundreds of small states; develop a theory of how high-level cooperation, and therefore stable political order, is achieved in the absence of central authority; and document ancient Greek economic growth. Chapter 5 suggests two primary drivers of Greek growth: First is the establishment of fair rules that encouraged investment in human capital and lowered transaction costs. Next is competition among individuals and states, driving continuous institutional and technological innovation, and motivating rational cooperation.

Chapters 6–9 tell the story of the rise of classical Greece: the historical development of citizen-centered politics and economic growth from the age of Homer to Aristotle. We focus on a few particularly successful and influential states but also attend to the historical development of less prominent and less powerful communities. The rise of Hellas is illuminated by similarities and differences among Athens, Sparta, and Syracuse and by the differential historical trajectories of many Greek states of different sizes and levels of prominence. Comparing the internal development of great and small city-states reveals how innovative political institutions and culture stimulated specialization and fomented creative destruction. The failure of Athens to sustain its fifth century BCE empire demonstrates the robustness of the decentralized Greek social ecology, while dense populations and high per capita incomes in the postimperial era demonstrate that empire was not a precondition for continued economic growth.

Chapter 10 narrates the political fall, showing how the products of Greek specialization, especially military and financial expertise, were taken up by leaders of states on the frontiers of the Greek world, and how Philip and Alexander of Macedon, the most talented of these entrepreneurial opportunists, terminated the era in which independent city-states determined the course of Greek history.

Chapter 11 concludes by explaining the surprising robustness of the polis ecology and continued high economic performance in the postclassical era. Because Hellas did not collapse after the political fall of the major independent city-states, the memory of Greek political exceptionalism has been preserved as part of the world’s cultural heritage. As a result, classical Greece remains a resource for theorists of decentralized social order, and both an inspiration and a cautionary tale for those who aspire to practice citizen-centered politics.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have been thinking about and working on the subject matter of this book since I first fell in love with Greek history. That was in an introductory class at the University of Minnesota taught by Thomas Kelly, who, after overcoming his skepticism about my seriousness of purpose, sent me on to earn a Ph.D. under the direction of Chester Starr at the University of Michigan. Kelly’s high standards for writing history and Starr’s belief that Greek historians must seek to understand social, political, and cultural change (and not just continuity) have guided my studies ever since.

I have been extraordinarily lucky in my subsequent career to have colleagues eager and able to help me as I struggled to make sense of the Greek past and with the question of why it ought to matter to anyone who was not convinced, as I always have been, that it is the most fascinating possible subject of inquiry. I learned a great deal about history beyond antiquity from colleagues in the Department of History and Philosophy at Montana State University; about classical studies beyond history and about political theory from colleagues in the Department of Classics and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton; and, most recently, about political institutions and behavior, quantitative methods, and causal inference from my colleagues in the Departments of Political Science and Classics at Stanford.

Along the way, I have been equally lucky in having the chance to teach and to learn from extraordinary students, undergraduate and graduate alike. A list of those who influenced the ideas and arguments in this book would, in its length, grossly violate the norms governing expressions of academic gratitude. Many who deserve mention here are unnamed but not unremembered.

Special thanks are due to those who read various drafts. John Ma, Adrienne Mayor, Michelle Maskiell, Ian Morris, and an anonymous reader for Princeton University Press read drafts of the entire manuscript and made erudite, thoughtful, and detailed suggestions that have substantially improved the final result. Peter van Alfen, Ryan Balot, Sarah Ferrario, Rob Fleck, Stephen Haber, Eero Hämeenniemi, Andy Hanssen, James Kierstead, Carl Hampus Lyttkens, Emily Mackil, Walter Scheidel, Matt Simonton, Barry Strauss, David Teegarden, and Greg Woolf commented helpfully on parts of the manuscript and raised my occasionally flagging spirits with their enthusiasm. I owe special thanks to Deborah Gordon for introducing me to the world of ant science and for discussions of information exchange, evolution, and behavior; to Steve Haber and Barry Weingast for many long and deep discussions concerning institutions, economics, game theory—and much else. Eleni Tsakopoulos, Markos Kounalakis, and Yan Lin have supported my work at Stanford, both materially and through their ardent belief that Greek culture and democratic politics belong together as matters of the greatest possible import.

My profound indebtedness to the work of the Copenhagen Polis Center (CPC), and especially to its former director, Mogens Hansen, will be evident throughout. David Teegarden, Tim Johnson, and Bailey McRae entered some of the published results of the CPC onto spreadsheets, thereby making those results available as data for quantitative analysis. Those data were made publicly accessible on an interactive Web page (http://polis.stanford.edu) created and designed by Maya Krishnan, a Stanford undergraduate whose talents range from history and philosophy to computer science. Michele Angel transmogrified crude versions of the maps and figures into their present forms. Stanford University, through its School of Humanities and Science, provided substantial material, as well as intellectual, support for this project from the beginning. I hardly need say that, while whatever merit this book possesses is due in large measure to others, its errors of omission and commission are my own.

Rob Tempio, who is my editor at Princeton University Press, along with my literary agent Jill Marsal, played a formative role in the book’s genesis and a major part in its subsequent development. The editorial, production, and marketing staff at Princeton University Press have also been outstanding throughout. In an age in which scholarly books are sometimes regarded as exotic luxury goods, their passion for academic book publishing is an inspiration and offers hope for the future of a uniquely deep and powerful form of intellectual communication.

This book is dedicated to Adrienne Mayor—my life partner, intellectual companion, closest friend, my heart’s desire—who once warned me that autodidacticism has its limits and urged me to try a few university courses.

ABBREVIATIONS

NOTE: Ancient Greek authors, whose works are available in the Loeb Classical Library and other modern editions, are cited by book, chapter, and section, according to the ordinary practice of classical historians.

MAP 1 The 45 regions of the Greek world.

Regions (indicated by numbers on the map) are per order in the Inventory, based on 907 of 1,035 total city-states with known (or plausibly inferred) locations. Polis numbers are per the Inventory. See further appendix I. Known or plausibly hypothesized locations of individual poleis: http://polis.stanford.edu/. Most but not all of the poleis listed in the Inventory were in existence in the later fourth century BCE; some had, however, gone out of existence before that time. 128 of 1,035 poleis in the Inventory have not been located with enough confidence for mapping. Note that region 1 is off the map to the left—for locations of region 1 poleis, see map 3.

Map KEY

region number (poleis in the region: Inventory numbers), region name

MAP 2 The Greek world in context.

THE RISE AND FALL OF CLASSICAL GREECE

1

THE EFFLORESCENCE OF CLASSICAL GREECE

FAIR GREECE, SAD RELIC

In 1812, Lord Byron published a poem that made him the hero of a world poised at the brink of modernity and ready for romance. It included these poignant lines:

Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth!

Immortal, though no more! though fallen, great!¹

With just fourteen words, Byron illuminated the stark contrast between Greek antiquity and the Greece he had observed during his travels in 1809 and 1810. Byron knew a lot about Greece. As an educated English nobleman, he had read classical literature. As an intrepid traveler, he had personal experience of early nineteenth century Greece. By Byron’s day, the Greeks had suffered as subjects of the Ottoman Empire for more than 300 years, and, more recently, from the rapacity of European collectors. But Greece was already a relic of departed worth when Pausanias, a travel writer of the Roman imperial age, described Greek antiquities in the second century. Neither Byron nor Pausanias could have guessed that at the dawn of the twentieth century, Greece would be the poorest country in Europe or that in the early twenty-first century, two centuries after Byron wrote his memorable lines, Greece would be sadder yet—wracked by a political and economic crisis that immiserated millions of Greek citizens and threatened the financial stability of Europe.²

Byron’s vision of greatness was inspired by ancient Greek cultural and intellectual achievement: art and architecture, literature, visual and performance art, scientific and moral thought. A generation later, the British banker-scholar George Grote published his monumental History of Greece (12 volumes: 1846–1856), a work that came to define, for the English-speaking world, the greatness of classical Greece in terms of a unique set of values and institutions: democracy, freedom, equality, dignity—conjoined with a dedication to reason, critical inquiry, and innovation.

Despite its brevity and limited frame, Byron’s romantic couplet, with its sharp contrast between the fortunes of ancient and modern Greece and its explosion of exclamation points, captures the mystery that this book explains: Why and how did the ancient Greeks create a culture that became central to the modern world? If Hellas had once been great, why was it no longer? Why, once fallen, was Greece so long and well remembered?

Those questions remain vitally important in the twenty-first century, and they can be answered. Hellas—the ancient Greek world that, even before the conquests of Alexander the Great, extended east into western Asia, north to the Black Sea, south to North Africa, and west to Italy, France, and Spain—was great indeed. Hellas was great because of a cultural accomplishment that was supported by sustained economic growth. That growth was made possible by a distinctive approach to politics.

CLASSICAL GREEK EFFLORESCENCE

In a spirited diatribe against the habit of dividing world history into dichotomous eras of premodern economic stagnation and modern growth, the historical sociologist Jack Goldstone has shown that a number of premodern societies experienced more or less extended periods of efflorescence—increased economic growth accompanied by a sharp uptick in cultural achievement. Efflorescence is characterized by more people (demographic growth) living at higher levels of welfare (per capita growth) and by cultural production at a higher level. It is not signaled merely by treasure heaped up in palace storerooms or by monumental architecture. Concentrations of state capital and grand building projects may or may not be accompanied by a dramatic rise in population, welfare, and culture.

Efflorescence is impermanent by definition, but some efflorescences are more dramatic and longer lasting than others. Modernity—the experience of the developed world since the early nineteenth century—is the most dramatic, but not (yet) the longest lasting efflorescence in human history. It remains an open question whether the historically exceptional rate of sustained economic growth that some parts of the world have experienced in the past two centuries is merely the most recent and biggest (by many orders of magnitude) of a long series of efflorescences—or whether this time it’s different, so that modernity represents a fundamental and permanent change of the direction of human history. Goldstone focuses on examples of efflorescence after 1400 CE, but he notes in passing that classical Greece was among a handful of societies that experienced efflorescence long before that date.³

The Greek efflorescence that peaked by around 300 BCE lasted several hundred years, from the Archaic, through the Classical, and into the Hellenistic eras of Greek history. Figure 1.1, based on evidence presented in chapter 4, illustrates efflorescence in terms of economic development (measured by population and consumption) in core Greece from the Late Bronze Age to the dawn of the twentieth century. Because, by my definition, core Greece is limited to the territory controlled by the Greek state in the late nineteenth century CE, the graph understates the total population of the wider Greek world at the peak of the classical efflorescence by a factor of about three—so the chart captures only part of the rise. But the main implication is clear enough: it was not until the twentieth century that the number of people living in the Greek core, and their material welfare, returned to levels comparable to those achieved some 2,300 years before.⁴

The ancient Greek efflorescence was exceptional in premodern world history. While ancient Greek economic growth fell far short of the growth rates experienced by the globe’s most highly developed countries since the nineteenth century, the ancient Greek efflorescence was distinctive for its duration, its intensity, and its long-term impact on world culture. The Greek efflorescence took place in a social ecology of hundreds of city-states. Greeks, for our purposes, are the residents of communities that were, in antiquity, substantially (not homogeneously) Greek in terms of language and a distinctive suite of cultural features.⁵ While wealth and incomes remained unequal in those communities, a substantial part of the Greek population experienced relative prosperity. The growth of the Greek economy was driven, at least in part, by the ability of an extensive middle class to consume goods and services at a level well above mere existence.⁶

Ancient Greek society was unlike our modernity in important ways: Among other things, slavery was taken for granted and women never held political participation rights. Yet the most developed states of classical Hellas in some respects tracked conditions typical of developed modern states as late as the mid-nineteenth century. Residents of the most developed ancient Greek states experienced aspects of a precocious modernity before the fact. As Byron’s lines remind us, the classical efflorescence was not sustained indefinitely. Yet, by the same token, it was never forgotten.⁷

We can answer questions about Greece that remained mysterious for Byron because we have better data. We now know much more about ancient Hellas than he could have known. Happily for the contemporary investigator seeking to explain the changing fortunes of Hellas, a great deal of primary evidence for Greek history has come down to us from antiquity—it survived the fall for reasons we will explore in chapter 11. Moreover, from the age of Byron onward, classical Greece was such a hot field of inquiry that many of the Western world’s most brilliant intellects devoted their lives to investigating its every facet. After generations of exploration and reconstruction by historians and archaeologists, there is now an unrivaled historical record for the Greek world in the first millennium BCE.

Equally important, that massive and detailed record has been organized by encyclopedic projects and thereby made available for systematic analysis. The most important of these, for our purposes, is the monumental Inventory of Archaic and Classical Greek Poleis (hereafter "the Inventory"), compiled by an international team under the direction of the preeminent Danish historian of the Greek world, Mogens H. Hansen.⁸ The Inventory collects detailed information for 1,035 Greek states known to have existed in the extended Greek world, across 45 regions, during the 500-year period from the eighth through the later fourth century BCE. Each state has a separate entry and a corresponding inventory (i) number. These numbers (e.g., Athens = i361) help us to be clear about which Greek states are being discussed in the pages that follow (some Greek names are shared by more than one state, others are Anglicized in various ways). The 45 Inventory regions are illustrated in map 1.

Meanwhile, the archaeological and some relevant documentary evidence for the long history of the Greek world, from the Bronze Age to modernity, has been recently summarized and reassessed in a magisterial volume by John Bintliff of the University of Leiden. Bintliff’s detailed survey, which includes analyses of demographic change over time, enables us to assess the data for archaic and classical Greece against a much broader chronological context.⁹

The mass of quantifiable evidence assembled in the Inventory, and in other recent collections of data on Greek history, archaeology, and geography, has made it possible to employ the sharp analytical tools of contemporary social science when we seek to explain Greek history. By quantifying evidence, we can estimate the total population of the classical Greek world and of each of its regions. We can study comparative state and regional development across the Greek world, and we can compare the Greek world to other premodern societies. All of this comparison allows us to test competing explanations for the rise to greatness of Hellas, for its fall, and for its enduring influence. The data on which my statistics are based are publicly available at http://polis.stanford.edu.¹⁰

The twenty-first century has seen a renaissance in the study of ancient Greek and Roman economic history. Following a generation of scholarship grounded on the premise that a unitary ancient economy, lasting for millennia, was defined by a deep social structure inherently resistant to change, economic historians are now attempting to measure and to explain economic growth and decline in specific times and places within the premodern world. Much recent scholarship on Greek and Roman economies is predicated on the new institutional economics pioneered by the Nobel Prize–winning economist and political scientist, Douglass North and exemplified by recent work by the MIT and Harvard social scientists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. Their insistence that institutions (the rules of the game) and organizations (including, but not only, states), along with markets and networks, are fundamental determinants of economic change, grounds the arguments of this book. Scholars working in the institutional economics field seek, first, to develop a plausible theory of how specific institutions in a given society affected social choices, and then to test the theory against competitor theories by reference to a substantial body of evidence. At its best, institutional economics offers bold, new, and defensible explanations for important developments in historical and contemporary societies.¹¹

Along with a theory of social choice under conditions of decentralized authority, and data for testing the theory, this book presents a new narrative history of Greek political and economic development. It does not pretend to offer a comprehensive account of every major event of ancient Greek history. I focus more on formal institutions and civic order than on the politically salient informal cultural performances that have been wonderfully elucidated by Sara Forsdyke, a classical Greek historian at the University of Michigan.¹² I will have little to say about the Greek family, religion, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, childhood, aging, sport, or other important areas of social history. Other books, by scholars more knowledgeable than I, cover each of these areas well. Nor do I describe in detail the cultural accomplishments that so impressed Byron. While cultural accomplishment is an important part of the efflorescence I seek to explain, this terrain has been brilliantly elucidated by others. I assume that it is uncontroversial to say that in the areas of visual art, architecture, drama, historiography, philosophy (ethics, politics, epistemology, metaphysics, logic), and natural science (geometry, geography, astronomy, medicine), classical Greece provided enduringly important resources for world culture. Finally, although promising recent collaborations between historians and geneticists have demonstrated that, as a result of colonization and mobility, ancient Greeks had a profound and enduring impact on the genetic makeup of populations in the western, as well as eastern Mediterranean, I will not seek to address the genetic legacy of Hellas.¹³

My goal is to measure the classical Greek efflorescence and to explain how political institutions and culture enabled the Greek world to rise to greatness from humble beginnings, how the great states of Greece fell to a predatory empire, and how Greek culture was subsequently preserved for posterity.

SMALL STATES, DISPERSED AUTHORITY

After two centuries of intensive scholarly research and with the aid of the Inventory, we can now grasp, much more clearly than Byron or his contemporaries could have, the extent and development of ancient Hellas. First and foremost, it was a world defined by a startlingly large number of surprisingly small states—there were about 1,100 Greek states by the end of the third quarter of the fourth century BCE—when Aristotle was writing his masterpiece on Politics and his student, Alexander the Great, was completing the conquest of western Asia. The extended Greek world of city-states stretched from outposts in Spain and France, through southern Italy and Sicily, to the Greek peninsula; east and north to Thrace (modern Bulgaria), to the shores of the Black Sea and western Anatolia; then south to eastern and southern outposts in Syria and North Africa (map 1). By Alexander’s day, the total population of Hellas—that is, the residents of small states that were substantially Greek in language and culture—was in excess of 8 million people.¹⁴

Individual Greek states varied tremendously in their size and influence. Athens, Sparta (i345), and Syracuse (i47), which provide focal points for developing the ideas in this book, were among the largest and most influential states in Hellas. Athens boasted a territory of some 2,500 km²—about the size of Luxembourg or Orange County in southern California—and a population of perhaps a quarter-million people. A more typical Greek polis, Athens’ northwestern neighbor, Plataea (i216), had a territory of ca. 170 km², with a population below 10,000. And a great many Greek states were considerably smaller than that. At the lower end of the range, Koresia (i493), the smallest of four poleis on the modest-sized (129 km²) island of Kea, possessed a territory of roughly 15 km²—about one-fifth the area of the island of Manhattan or one-seventh the area of Paris. Yet in important ways, the Greek states were peer polities, interacting with one another diplomatically, militarily, and economically as equals in their standing as states, if not in power, wealth, or influence.¹⁵

These small Greek states were city-states—in ancient Greek, poleis (singular polis). By Aristotle’s day, a polis was characterized by a well-defined urban center, typically walled, in which lived perhaps half of the polis’ population. The urban center was surrounded by a rural hinterland. The hinterland of larger poleis featured small towns, as well as villages, and farmsteads. Near the borders were pastureland and tracts of near wilderness. Boundaries between the many states of Hellas were quite clearly defined, although not always respected by neighboring states: Disputing borders was a major source of conflict between poleis, and wars among the Greek states were frequent. As a result of warfare, and of diplomatic negotiations carried out in the shadow of war, some poleis went out of existence altogether. Close to 100 Greek states, about one in ten of the known poleis, are known to have disappeared, through extermination or assimilation, by the time of the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE. Many other poleis were less than fully independent in terms of their authority to determine their own foreign policy. But, by definition, each polis had considerable local authority to set and to enforce the rules by which its residents lived.¹⁶

There have been dozens of small-state, dispersed-authority cultures in world history—prominently including ancient Renaissance northern Italy and the Hanseatic League of late medieval/early modern northwestern Europe. Other city-state cultures are documented in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the New World. When juxtaposed to centralized authority cultures—most obviously in the form of empires (imperial Rome, Han China), and nation-states (Europe after 1500)—that have tended to dominate the political history of the premodern world, these small-state cultures are sometimes disproportionately influential in terms of their long-term impact on world history. Examples of small-state cultures that punched over their weight include, in addition to the two examples above, the city-states of early Mesopotamia, which pioneered many of the basic elements of urban civilization, the commercial city-states of Phoenicia, and the Etruscans of northwestern Italy (see map 2).

Small-state, dispersed-authority systems can be compared to a natural ecology, characterized by a rich variety of plant and animal species, none of which is dominant. Large, highly centralized states more closely resemble the ecology of a modern large-scale factory farm, which efficiently produces great quantities of a single crop by eliminating diversity. Hellas was a strikingly extensive and long-lived small-state, dispersed authority culture—and it was by far the largest and the longest lived city-state culture in documented world history.

Among the central questions raised by ancient Greek history is how and why such an extensive small-state system persisted, in such a flourishing condition, for such a long time. In an inversion of, for example, European history from 1500 to 1900 or Chinese history from ca. 700 to 200 BCE, there were many more independent states in the Greek ecology by the height of the classical efflorescence than there had been several hundred years previously. Despite repeated attempts, no classical-era Greek city-state succeeded in creating a centralized empire (chapter 8). Why, during the era of efflorescence, did the many states of Hellas not consolidate into a unitary empire, on the model of Persia, Carthage, or Rome? Or, failing that, into several large competitor states, on the model of ancient Phoenicia, or Warring States China, or Europe ca. 1500–1900?¹⁷

All workable social systems are predicated on creating reliable forms of cooperation among an extensive population and then distributing the fruits of that cooperation across the population in ways that prevent the outbreak of catastrophic levels of violence. Centralized authority systems work according to the simple and powerful logic of command-and-control: Cooperation is achieved through obedience to a central coercive authority. With a unified authority structure capable of enforcing cooperation, and a distribution plan designed to ensure that those who are capable of destabilizing society through violence have no incentive to do so, conflict is effectively reduced.¹⁸

The basic logic of centralized authority has long been appreciated; Thomas Hobbes, in his great mid-seventeenth century work of political theory, Leviathan (1996), remains among the most astute and influential of its expositors. Hobbes famously argued that the choice faced by all societies is between